fedora 32, 3d printers, hard drives, taco bell
The end of April saw the posting of a complex patch set called "Popcorn Linux distributed thread execution". It is the first appearance on the kernel mailing lists of an academic project (naturally called Popcorn Linux) that has been underway since 2013 or so. This project has, among other goals, the objective of turning a tightly networked set of computers into something that looks like a single system — a sort of NUMA machine with even larger than usual inter-node costs. The posted code, which is a portion of the larger project, is focused on process migration and memory sharing across machines. It is an interesting proof of concept, but one should not expect to see it merged in anything close to its current form. Each node in a Popcorn system is a separate Linux host sitting on the network. Popcorn itself is started by loading a kernel module that is charged with connecting the larger system together. The module reads a list of IP addresses (IPv4 only) directly from a file (/etc/popcorn/nodes by default). Each machine will make a TCP connection to every node listed ahead of itself in this file, then wait for an incoming connection from every node listed afterward. Thereafter, each node is known by an integer ID which is simply its position in the nodes file.
There is a hard-coded maximum of 62 nodes. No sort of authentication is done for incoming node connections, which might seem like a bit of a security issue; indeed, the patch set warns against running Popcorn on machines connected to the Internet. There does not seem to be any provision for nodes going up or down or being absent entirely. Comments in the patch set say that the TCP-based communication system "is intended for Popcorn testing and development purposes only", suggesting that, someday, somebody will get around to implementing something better.
Developers who are concerned about system integrity often put a fair amount of effort into ensuring that data stored on disk cannot be tampered with without being detected. Technologies like dm-verity and fs-verity are attempts to solve this problem, as is the recently covered integrity policy enforcement security module. More Recently, Johannes Thumshirn has posted a patch series adding filesystem-level authentication to Btrfs; it promises to provide integrity with a surprisingly small amount of code. Integrity-verification code at the filesystem or storage level generally works by calculating (and storing) checksums of each block of data. When it comes time to read that data, the checksum is calculated anew and compared to the stored value; if the two match, one can be confident that the data has not been modified (or corrupted by the hardware) since the checksum was calculated. If there is reason to believe that the stored checksum is what the creator of the data intended, then the data, too, should be as intended.
Solutions like dm-verity and fs-verity work by storing checksums apart from the data; fs-verity, for example, places the checksum data in a hidden area past the end of the file. The developers of more modern filesystems, though, have generally taken the idea that storage devices are untrustworthy (if not downright malicious) to heart; as a result, they design the ability to calculate, store, and compare checksums into the filesystem from the beginning. Btrfs is one such filesystem; as can be seen from the on-disk format documentation, most structures on disk have a checksum built into them. Checksums for file data is stored in a separate tree. So much of the needed infrastructure is already there.
Checksums in Btrfs, though, were primarily intended to catch corruption caused by storage hardware. The thing about hardware is that, while it can be creative indeed in finding new ways to mangle data, it's generally not clever enough to adjust checksums to match. Attackers tend to be a bit more thorough. So the fact that a block of data stored in a Btrfs filesystem matches the stored checksum does not, by itself, give much assurance that the data has not been messed with in a deliberate way.
To gain that assurance, Btrfs needs to use a checksum that cannot readily be altered by an attacker. Btrfs already supports a number of checksum algorithms, but none of them have that property. So the key to adding the needed sort of authentication to Btrfs is to add another checksum algorithm with the needed assurance. Thumshirn chose to add an HMAC checksum based on SHA-256.
Normally, files exist in a filesystem to keep data contained within them separated; seeing data exchanged directly between files is often a sign of filesystem corruption. There are, however, use cases where it is desirable to be able to perform a controlled swap of data between a pair of files. Darrick Wong has recently posted a patch set implementing this feature for the XFS filesystem, but also making it available in a general way.
As it happens, XFS has had a data-swapping capability for some time: the rigorously undocumented XFS_IOC_SWAPEXT ioctl() command will exchange extents of data in two files. This feature exists for one purpose in particular: defragmentation of filesystems. The xfs_fsr utility does its job by scanning a filesystem for the most highly fragmented files — those that are split up into the largest number of extents. It then creates a new file with a single extent large enough to hold one of the fragmented files and copies the data over. The final step is an XFS_IOC_SWAPEXT operation to atomically replace the old file's data blocks with the new, defragmented version.
It seems, however, that there are other interested users out there. Application developers would like a way to replace some or all of the contents of a file in an atomic and safe way — one which preferably does not leave the file corrupted if the system goes down partway through. Currently such tasks must be handled by creating a temporary file, populating it, and renaming it over the original; this works, but it is a multi-step affair that is hard to get right.
Hi all,
I'd like to announce the third release candidate for the 20.1 branch, Mesa 20.1.0-rc3.
As always, please test it and report any issues you may find to https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/issues/new
And to help us track issues and merge requests relevant to this branch, please add them to the 20.1.0 release milestone: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/milestones/14
There's a good amount of fixes here, but there are still open issues that we'll need to close before the final release, which is currently planned for the 27th.
The next release candidate is scheduled for 7 days from now, on 2020-05-20.
Eric
While already various changes are building up for Mesa 20.2, the Mesa 20.1 release process is still progressing with hopes of shipping this quarter's stable release later in the month.
The third release candidate of Mesa 20.1 is out as of a few hours ago. Over the past week the fixes hitting the 20.1 tree have fixed an ACO issue, some minor Intel fixes, an R600 NIR compiler options fix for that experimental functionality, fixes for V3D, and other fixes.
  Aterminal emulator is computer software which emulates a dumb video terminal within some other display architecture.
The terminal window allows the user to access a console and all its applications such as command line interfaces (CLI) and text user interface software. Even with the sophistication of modern desktop environments packed with administrative tools, other utilities, and productivity software all sporting attractive graphical user interfaces, it remains the case that some tasks are still best undertaken with the command line.
Modern desktop environments come supplied with a number of terminal emulators already installed. In the case of GNOME, KDE, and XFCE (three popular desktop environments), the user is offered GNOME Terminal, Konsole, and Terminal respectively as the default terminal emulator. However, this does not necessarily mean that the pre-selected terminal emulator is best suited for your own specific requirements or your hardware.
Logs can now be filtered by keywords and free text. Keywords include units, time constraints, priority, and arbitrary journal fields. Dropdowns adjust the query string — so there’s no need to remember the most common journal keywords. Also, copying and pasting this query string across machines allows administrators to have a precise filtered view of logs.
A pause button has been included next to the filters, to pause the streaming of logs. When toggled, it changes to a resume button, letting you quickly switch back to a stream of incoming journal entries.
  After the release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, many of its derivatives such as Umix, Voyager, UbuntuDDE, and Pop!_OS came into the limelight by switching their base to the latest v20.04. But one of the distros that managed to grab my special attention was Linuxfx 10, which is also based on Ubuntu 20.04.
I chose to review it because I believe Linuxfx has the closest pre-installed user interface to Microsoft’s Windows 10. You may have already guessed the reason — the Windows theme. Nonetheless, Linuxfx suits best for beginners who want to migrate to Linux but find it hard to work on Linux desktop like GNOME or KDE.
That’s right: after a 5 year hiatus, Finnix — the LiveCD for system administrators and the oldest LiveCD in production — is back to celebrate its 20 year anniversary in 2020 with Finnix 120.
Finnix 120 is a complete overhaul, with a number of major changes (as well as too many minor changes to enumerate).
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In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 20.04.
I understand these needs and see it firsthand every day. For nearly 30 years, SUSE has helped our customers meet their digital transformation goals while showcasing the tangible business outcomes our innovation delivers through our secure, reliable, and cost-effective open source solutions. Built by our community of innovators – the power of many – SUSE enables our customers around the world to simplify, modernize, and accelerate their businesses so they can deliver on what matters most to their customers.
From our perspective, we see open source not only as an increasingly powerful way for agencies to modernize their IT systems faster, but we also see the importance of helping customers capitalize on open source solutions based on what success means to them. With open source, you are not locked into a vendor, you have the ultimate flexibility to build your IT based on your needs. This is the value of open source, and with the powerful community of innovators, the power of many, open source innovations can help agencies start from where they are and get them to where they need to be.
Few days ago i saw that Cinnamon 4.6.0 has been released on GitHub and as usual, developers will still release a couple more releases before they mark it stable, but i have made some changes to the SlackBuild scripts and push it to master branch for those who are eager to try the new Cinnamon 4.6.x series.
I believe this version will be used in the next Linux Mint 20 which will be released in June, but i want Slackware-Current users to try this version first :)
About a year ago, we officially moved the Ask Fedora user support web site to a new platform. The work started around February 2019. We archived the old Askbot instance and we moved to Discourse. This post looks back on the first year with the new site.
As recently announced by Sergio we now support the libvirt provider for our Oracle Linux Vagrant Boxes.
The libvirt provider is a good alternative to the virtualbox one when you already use KVM on your host, as KVM and VirtualBox virtualization are mutually exclusive. It is also a good choice when running Vagrant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
This blog post will guide you through the simple steps needed to use these new boxes on your Oracle Linux host (Release 7 or 8).
Bports Foundation is the community that adopted both Unity 8 and Ubuntu Touch projects ditched by its creator Canonical. Since then, they’ve continued the development to bring privacy, freedom, and Ubuntu experience on mobile devices.
Now, with the latest release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-12, they have reached a milestone of their largest release ever. This Over-The-Air-12 software update comes with a list of new features and changes for many Ubuntu Touch supported mobile devices. Let’s dive in to see what’s new with the OTA-12 major release.
  If there's one thing you can say about open source software (OSS), it's that it quietly yet inarguably runs our world. Most of the internet is built on open source software, and, these days, millions of developers build and maintain hundreds of thousands of open source packages in more than 250 programming languages. If that's not enough, enterprise companies continue to grow their investments in open source in 2020.
The more open source software permeates our everyday life, the more important it becomes to keep all these projects secure, compatible, and well-maintained.
  Today's manufacturing challenges demand integrated systems. As current events in the world unfold, the manufacturing industry is seeing rapidly changing demand, falling capacity to meet demand, and supply bottlenecks that have become difficult to predict and manage. On top of all of this is the global economic downturn, which impacts many manufacturers and suppliers today and for the foreseeable future.
Manufacturing output decreased by 0.4% in February 2020, following a 1% drop in the previous month. It marks the eighth straight month of annual declines in factory activity in the U.S. Also, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over the last decade, the number of manufacturing jobs has steadily declined. In March 2020, average weekly hours fell by 0.3 hours for all manufacturing workers and by 0.3 hours for production employees. The skills gap is also widening in manufacturing and is expected to cause losses of $454 billion in manufacturing GDP by 2028.
SHARE The next major release of LibreOffice version 7.0 under heavy development at the moment and alpha1 is out. I have obtained some information about the potential features and updates from official sites, changelogs. Have a look.
LibreOffice, the popular free and open-source office suite has come a long way from the initial OpenOffice days. It is now a default office suite for almost all Linux Distributions and being used heavily in Windows and Mac. With its popularity and user base increasing, developers are adding more features into LibreOffice so that users can experience a top tier free office suite.
The current LibreOffice version is 6.4.x and there is no particular reason for bumping up the version to 7.0. However, LibreOffice 7.0 looks promising at the moment.
LibreOffice version 7.0 is due in early August 2020. Here’s the release plan summary.
Stallman agreed with that sentiment. But he would also like to see Emacs return to popularity as an editor of text for publication. Several noted that Org mode is already being used successfully for text-publication purposes. That mode is not familiar to Stallman and he was unable to learn much about using it for word processing by reading the documentation. Zaretskii pointed out that there is a high barrier to learning Org mode from its documentation, at least for the word-processing use case.
Once again, though, it seems quite unlikely that some putative, well-documented word-processing Emacs mode is likely to have users flocking to the editor. But Stallman said that the user profile for Emacs was much broader 30 years ago; he would like to see it be that way again. He personally does not see rounded corners as part of that, though he is not opposed to efforts in that direction; "[...] if you want to attract more users to Emacs, I think there are more important areas for improvement." Lu had some ideas along those lines, for example using starter kits (or packs) to help make the editor "more friendly to newcomers".
There was a difference of opinion about making changes to the defaults, though, in order to help newcomers. If changes need to be made for the sake of newcomers, ndame said, established users can just turn them off. For example, Cua Mode, which adds the "standard" keybindings for things like cut and paste (i.e. ctrl-c, ctrl-x, ctrl-v) to Emacs, should be on by default; "it could make the life of new users easier if they didn't have to turn it on explicitly and they could use their copy/paste keys from the start like they are used it to in other tools".
As we use our computers, to watch YouTube videos of trucks hitting bridges, to have a Zoom call with our mothers, or even for some of us to write Hackaday articles, we’re unknowingly sharing a lot of what we are doing with the world. The RF emissions from our monitors, keyboards, and other peripherals can be harvested and reconstructed to give a third party a view into your work, and potentially have access to all your darkest secrets. It’s a technique with origins in Government agencies that would no doubt prefer to remain anonymous, but for a while now it has been available to all through the magic of software defined radio. Now it has reached the popular GNU Radio platform, with [Federico La Rocca]’s gr-tempest package.
A number of smaller German towns and municipalities – Leonberg in the state of Baden-Württemberg and Treuchtlingen in Bavaria are notable examples – have also forged ahead in this area although admittedly it's easier to migrate 40 desktops than around 15,000, as Munich did.
Sander notes that at their party conference in November last year, even Angela Merkel's normally conservative Christian Democratic (CDU) party set their sights on free software.
For future digital projects, "procurement and support will be bound by the principles of open source and open standards. Publicly financed software should serve all citizens," the party's statement said, echoing the Free Software Foundation's own campaign.
Of course, that's only a statement of political intent, the Foundation's Sander notes. But if the CDU remains in power, that could eventually become the official position of the whole German government.
One current ministry, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, has already taken a similar line. It commissioned consultancy PwC to look into how Germany could achieve more digital sovereignty and become less dependent on vendors like Microsoft.
One of the August 2019 study's recommendations was investing in more open-source software. While outlining various challenges, the analysts also said, "Ultimately, this option may conceivably lead to permanent independence from major vendors."
It's worth noting that the politician in charge of that ministry is Horst Seehofer, a member of the same political party, the conservative Christian Social Union, as the former deputy mayor of Munich is, who is often perceived as one of the prime movers against the LiMux project there.
So far, it's more words than deeds, the Fraunhofer Institute's Thapa concedes. As yet, none of the big players appears to have lost significant business to the free software movement in Germany. But it seems likely that commercial vendors will have a tougher time here in the near future.
"I find it very exciting that Munich is back," Thapa concludes. "The door of opportunity is open again and maybe this time they will go all the way through."
Announced back in March were the Marvell ThunderX3 Arm server processors with up to 96 cores per SoC and support for 4-way SMT to yield up to 384 threads per socket. These 7nm Arm server processors also support eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory, 64 lanes of PCIe 4.0, and other competitive features for a 2020 server CPU. While we await to see how the ThunderX3 processors perform, the compiler support and other Linux software features are getting all buttoned up.
Working on Web browsers development is not an easy feat but if there’s something I’m personally very grateful for when it comes to collaborating with this kind of software projects, it is their testing infrastructure and the peace of mind that it provides me with when making changes on a daily basis.
To help you understand the size of these projects, they involve tens of millions of lines of code (Chromium is ~25 million lines of code, followed closely by Firefox and WebKit) and around 200-300 new patches landing everyday. Try to imagine, for one second, how we could make changes if we didn’t have such testing infrastructure. It would basically be utter and complete chaoââ¬â¹s and, more especially, it would mean extremely buggy Web browsers, broken implementations of the Web Platform and tens (hundreds?) of new bugs and crashes piling up every day… not a good thing at all for Web browsers, which are these days some of the most widely used applications (and not just ‘the thing you use to browse the Web’).
I have been using my Geforce 1060 extensively for deep learning, both with Python and R. But the always painful play with the closed source drivers and kernel updates, paired with the collapse of my computer’s PSU and/or GPU, I decided to finally do the switch to AMD graphic card and open source stack. And you know what, within half a day I had everything, including Tensorflow running. Yeah to Open Source!
Server have, on average, different needs. A Rails app that takes a network request and makes a database call may barely touch disk. A file server often cache files in buffer pools, serving them from RAM rather than disk.
The default disk you get on GCP, regional persistent disks, will top out around 240MiB/s. That is one order of magnitude slower than the NVMe disk on your laptop.
Your laptop will make you think your logging framework isn’t your primary bottleneck
Erlang/OTP 23 is a new major release with new features, improvements as well as a few incompatibilities.
Django 3.1 alpha 1 is now available. It represents the first stage in the 3.1 release cycle and is an opportunity for you to try out the changes coming in Django 3.1.
Django 3.1 has a potpourri of new features which you can read about in the in-development 3.1 release notes.
The Python 3.8 series is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.
On behalf of the entire Python development community, and the currently serving Python release team in particular, I’m pleased to announce the release of Python 3.8.3, the third maintenance release of Python 3.8. You can find it here:
https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-383/
It contains two months worth of bug fixes. Detailed information about all changes made in 3.8.3 can be found in its change log. Note that compared to 3.8.2, version 3.8.3 also contains the changes introduced in 3.8.3rc1.
The Python 3.8 series is the newest feature release of the Python language, and it contains many new features and optimizations. See the “What’s New in Python 3.8” document for more information about features included in the 3.8 series.
For one of my project, I needed to host an API service on the RapidAPI platform. In order to make sure that all the requests to the application are routed via RapidAPI I needed to check special header sent by RapidAPI.
RapidAPI forwards each valid request to the configured server, but injects additional header X-RapidAPI-Proxy-Secret. While a hacker may also send the same header, the value of this header will be only known to RapidAPI platform and your app.
I deployed the server on heroku, and defined an environment variable PROXY_SECRET which I check against the one sent with the request.
Sometimes I need to test the server directly, in which case I simply do not set this variable (like on my local machine) and this check is bypassed.
This year PHP turned 25 and, as with all things, the hope is that with age comes wisdom and maturity. Often derided as a great way to write bad (and insecure) code, PHP is hard to ignore completely when it is used in nearly eight out of ten websites. With PHP 7.4.5 released in April, it's worthwhile to take a look at modern PHP, how it has evolved to address the criticisms of the past, and what lies ahead in its future.
[...]
In the early days of PHP, two repositories, PEAR and PECL, were created to catalog both reusable PHP code and non-bundled, C-based extensions, respectively. PECL continues to be a valuable collection with over 400 extensions, from authentication to data structures, however it has failed to become a widespread tool allowing PHP developers to use those extensions because they introduce system-level dependencies that are generally unavailable on cheaper hosting providers. PEAR, being pure PHP code, was more successful in adoption yet struggled to become the tool it was intended to be. Unfortunately code age and quality proved to be too big of a hurdle to overcome and, because of this, PEAR was officially disabled by default as of PHP 7.4.
RPMs of PHP version 7.4.6 are available in remi repository for Fedora 32 and remi-php74 repository for Fedora 30-31 and Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 7 (RHEL, CentOS).
RPMs of PHP version 7.3.18 are available in remi repository for Fedora 30-31 and remi-php73 repository for Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).
RPMs of PHP version 7.2.31 are available in remi-php72 repository for Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).
Another day, another JEP. The goal of JEP 380 is to introduce support for Unix-domain socket features that are common to the major Unix platforms and Windows. This will be achieved by adding a handful of API elements. Let’s take a closer look.
A new JDK Enhancement Proposal (JEP) has been put forward by Michael McMahon to add Unix-domain socket support to two APIs in the java.nio.channels package; the socket channel and server-socket channel. JEP 380 also aims to extend the inherited channel mechanism to support Unix-domain socket channels and server socket channels.
In late spring an age-old tradition places asparagus – the white kind preferred here – at the very top of German menus. But only until St. John’s Day, June 24th (the summer solstice). After that date farmers stop harvesting – to give plants at least 100 days to convalesce for the next year before the first frosts arrive (if frosts do arrive this year!).
Assaults on Civil Rights can be loud, with microphones or guns, but the effects of structural racism are often hushed, in the silence of dreams deferred. Whether we hear it or not, the Civil Rights rollback of 2020 is well underway.
The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare two fundamental flaws in the American healthcare system.
The pandemic has put President Trump and his beloved market in a Catch-22 situation, one that not all of us are in.
As I write (the weekend of 9-10 May), the UK’s death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic has reached 31,855. The UK, unlike the US, has started counting deaths in care homes.
There are two ways the COVID-19 story ends for the United States.
One laudable side effect of the COVID-19 panic is a nationwide effort to promote “vote by mail” as a universal alternative to standing in line at polling places. One reason that effort is laudable is that it would likely decrease vote fraud.
Somewhat exasperated by the Covid-19 models publicly showcased over the last two months, I decided to ring up virologist Luis Villarreal for his perspective. Luis Villarreal is founding director of University of California, Irvine’s Center for Virus Research and UCI Professor Emeritus, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.
Some protesters who descended on the Michigan state capitol to demand the state reopen the economy in spite of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic have spread infections in rural areas where they live, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told Vice President Mike Pence in a recorded phone conversation obtained by ABC News.
He’s trying to force the economy to reopen to boost his electoral chances, and he’s selling out Americans’ health to seal the deal. No matter the cost, Donald Trump’s chief concern is and will always be himself.
The wealthy may be fine with sacrificing the vulnerable, but workers are fighting for the sanctity of human life.
When it comes to the politics of medicine and disease, the United States has always attempted to steal the limelight, while adding the now faded colouring of universal human welfare. In 1965, Washington pledged financial and technical support to the international effort to eradicate smallpox, though the initiative had initially been spurred by the Soviet Union at the behest of virologist and deputy health minister Victor Zhdanov in 1958. At that point in time, the World Health Organisation was not so much a punch bag as vehicle for US foreign policy, to be cultivated rather than rebuked.
In the long run such a workforce could help address the long-standing shortage of primary care in the United States—including community-based programming to assist families with preventive health, nutrition, exercise, chronic diseases and mental health needs.
Against harassment and bigotry, Asian-American officials are finding ways to care for their communities through this crisis.
President Donald Trump has frequently bragged about the amount of testing being conducted across the United States in response to COVID-19 — but a recent study from New York University suggests that the testing going on within the White House itself is faulty.
President Donald Trump has privately expressed doubts about the coronavirus death toll in the United States, telling aides he believes the number is too high and overcounted.
On the morning of May 10, the inter-regional medical workers’ union “Deystvie” (“Action”), reported that employees of the Moscow Regional Ambulance Station had been complaining to their organization about a lack of PPE since April. The union emphasized that some emergency response workers had already fallen ill and that there had even been fatalities. According to the “Memory List,” a document compiled by Russian doctors to commemorate medical workers who have died during the coronavirus pandemic, at least three employees of the Moscow Regional Ambulance Station have died so far.€
On the morning of May 13, Russian officials announced that the country recorded 10,028 new coronavirus infections in the past day (up 4.3 percent from the day before) bringing the nation’s total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases to 242,271 patients. The only country in the world with more registered coronavirus patients is the United States, where nearly 1.4 million people have tested positive for the disease.
Most people understand immunity to mean that once a person has been exposed to a disease, they can’t get it again. It’s an easy concept to grasp, and some people have hoped that widespread immunity could be the way out of this pandemic: If enough of the population becomes immune to the disease, the spread would be stopped, since the virus would run out of new, susceptible targets. The “herd” of immune people would protect everyone.
But getting to herd immunity without a vaccine isn’t as simple as the idea itself. A number of variables can affect when herd immunity is reached — and what it costs to get there — and they vary depending on the disease. How infectious is the disease? How deadly is it? And how long do people stay immune once they’ve gotten it? Adjusting any of these variables can drastically change the outcome of this equation. You can probably sense where this is heading …
We’ve built a very simplified version of how those variables interact. (You’ll see just how simple in the methodology beneath the simulator.) To be clear, this is not about COVID-19 itself — instead, our calculator shows how a theoretical disease we’re calling Fictionitis would play out in a population that has never encountered it before and does nothing to try to stop it.
You’ll notice that each variable plays a role in setting a herd immunity threshold and reaching it.
Radical clerics also see the mysterious outbreak of the coronavirus as an opportunity to grow their religious hold on their followers by stoking fear. People are bullied into taking refuge from insufferable disasters in religion by adapting discriminatory but religiously endorsed behaviour.
An army of bot accounts linked to an alleged Chinese government-backed propaganda campaign is spreading disinformation on social media about coronavirus and other topics, including an exiled businessman, according to a London-based researcher.
The accounts have been used to promote content attacking critics of the Chinese government and to spread conspiracy theories blaming the U.S. for the origins of virus, according to Benjamin Strick, who specializes in analyzing information operations on social media websites.
Between April 25 and May 3, Strick said he identified more than 1,000 accounts on Twitter that were associated with the Chinese disinformation effort, as well as more than 50 different pages on Facebook. He estimated that 300 or 400 new Twitter accounts were joining the network each day, as part of the Chinese campaign.
Carlson, who like his Fox News colleagues is a political commentator with no medical background, questioned the science behind Fauci's testimony earlier in the day before a panel of top U.S. senators.
The state said the attack was discovered Friday and that it’s not going to paying ransom. The Office of Court Administration said that filings and research are still available and there was no indication any personal information was compromised.The “branch network” was disabled, including websites and servers, in response to the attack.
He said the courts' separate document filings system remains operational, the courts are working to ensure lawyers and the public can access court records through other means and that the courts are still granting motions for extensions on deadlines.
“We're trying to use everything available to us to keep access to the courts so we're using Twitter and social media,” Hawthorne said.
It noted that because of the ongoing nature of the investigation, remediation and recovery, OCA will not comment further until additional information is available for public release.
Officials have not said when the system will be back online, but they have set up a temporary website and are working with law enforcement and the Texas Department of Information Resources to investigate the attack.
The [attack] comes less than a year after nearly two dozen local governments in Texas were hit by a similar coordinated attack.
  Security is a perennial topic of interest for sysadmins. And securing new systems always presents a challenge because there really are no set standards for doing so. I'm pulling this article's list of security measures and controls from a variety of sources, including personal experience, DISA STIGs, and recommendations from other system administrators and security folks. While these security measures are good, they're only a first step toward better system security. These eight system controls are in no particular order of importance.
When American tech journalists see the words "vulnerability" and "Huawei" in close proximity these days, they tend to get over-excited and, as a result, produce copy that goes quite wonky.
A classic example of this was seen this week when the site, ZDNet, one of the tech powerhouses, reported on a patch submitted to the Linux kernel project by someone who called Huawei Kernel Self Protection.
The patch was found to have some trivial flaws by the maker of the Grsecurity kernel patch, Brad Spengler – a man who loves publicity and knows that picking a hole in a patch put out by someone who was seemingly associated with Huawei would generate interest among the US press.
He was right. But it's a pity that ZDNet did not take some time to check its facts, with its security writer Catalin Cimpanu theorising that this patch had "sparked interest in the Linux community as (sic) could signal Huawei's wish to possibly contribute to the official kernel".
Cimpanu has a history of screwing up when it comes to Linux. Huawei has been a contributor to the Linux kernel for quite a few years now. As one commenter on the US news aggregation site Slashdot pointed out, in 2017, Huawei was 15th in the list for top companies contributing to the Linux kernel, 4.8– 4.13, and third (after Intel and Google) in in the list of companies bringing in the most new developers.
Again, there are numerous people in numerous companies who make contributions to the Linux kernel on their own time; all patches are scrutinised by Linux creator Linus Torvalds, or one of his trusted lieutenants, before they are finally merged.
Hence, the excitement over some flaws in a patch is not really understandable.
As noted yesterday, Congress this week is considering a new bill (the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act of 2020) that would not only renew already widely abused and heavily criticized FISA (Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act) powers, but extend the law to include warrantless access to American browsing and search data, a longstanding goal of the "there's no such thing as too much domestic surveillance" set. Given the well documented problems with the existing system, there's a large bipartisan coalition that believes this is, well, idiotic.
The infamous Patriot Act, which uses the threat of terrorism to expand surveillance over American citizens, is up for renewal under the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act – which is set to be voted on soon. Specifically, Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the government to ask record keepers for records relating to ongoing investigations. As if the original phone metadata siphoning provisions of the Patriot Act aren’t enough, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has introduced an amendment which would allow the Department of Justice (DOJ) to have access to anybody’s web browsing and search history under Section 215.
It’s increasingly evident that the coronavirus pandemic will cause a radical re-shaping of many aspects of society, not least in the world of privacy. Many people are trying to discern the shape of that new world in the current evolving situation. An interesting analysis from Naomi Klein picks up on many themes that have appeared on this blog:
In the past few months, governments ranging from Australia to the United Kingdom and corporations as influential as Google and Apple have pushed the idea that cellphone tracking can be used to effectively fight COVID-19. There was even an essay here at Quillette, arguing that a mandatory phone tracking app would save lives while also saving jobs as a policy alternative to economic lockdown. Unfortunately, the idea that phone apps should be popularized or even mandated to fight outbreaks is techno-utopian, based on optimism rather than evidence. The real impact of such an approach on society wouldn’t be better immunity, but rather the acceptance and creeping growth of an even more powerful and omniscient global surveillance state.
The US Senate voted down an amendment to the USA Patriot Act on Wednesday that would create a tougher standard for government investigators to collect the web search and browsing histories of people in the states. The bipartisan amendment, proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, and Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, a Republican, would've required the Department of Justice to show probable cause when requesting approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect the data for counterterrorism or counterintelligence investigations.
The Pentagon presently spends a whopping $14 billion a year on space operations. In short, there's no need for this thing...except for Trump's political needs.
Federal investigators have rejected a plea from the Attorney General’s Office to reclassify actions by the Khachaturyan sisters from murder to justifiable self-defense. According to Alexey Liptser, the attorney for one of the sisters, the Investigative Committee has completed its reinvestigation and the defendants are now reviewing the new case materials.
Rights groups accuse the Trump administration of giving "Israeli authorities the greenlight to continue violating international laws."
After an extraordinary, two-year battle to keep secret the name of a Saudi diplomat suspected of ties to the 9/11 plot, the Justice Department accidentally disclosed the man’s name in a court filing.
The revelation of the Saudi official’s identity, in a federal court filing last week, did little to illuminate links between the Al Qaeda hijackers and the Saudi government, which is being sued for complicity in the 2001 attacks by survivors and families of the victims.
It also shines a light on the extraordinary efforts by top Trump administration officials in recent months to prevent internal documents about the issue from ever becoming public.
“This shows there is a complete government cover-up of the Saudi involvement,” said Brett Eagleson, a spokesman for the 9/11 families whose father was killed in the attacks. “It demonstrates there was a hierarchy of command that’s coming from the Saudi Embassy to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs [in Los Angeles] to the hijackers.”
A core part of EFF’s mission is transparency and access to information, because we know that in a nation bound by the rule of law, the public must have the ability to know the law and how it is being applied. That’s why the default rule is that the public must have full access to court records—even if those records contain unsavory details. Any departure from that rule must be narrow and well-justified.
But litigants and judges aren’t always rigorous in upholding that principle. For example, when Brian Fargo sued Jennifer Tejas for allegedly defamatory Instagram posts, he asked that the court seal portions of his filings that contained those posts, references to other people and private medical information. The court granted Fargo’s request, with little explanation or apparent care.
In the UK and elsewhere, many people were preoccupied last March with toilet tissue. Could it help to slow climate change?
"If we fail to develop a national coordinated response, based in science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged, causing unprecedented illness and fatalities."
"I commend Joe Biden for working together with my campaign to assemble a group of leading thinkers and activists who can and will unify our party in a transformational and progressive direction," Sen. Bernie Sanders said.
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky—As a teenager, amid the hardwood forests, waterfalls and wildflower meadows of the Parklands of Floyds Fork, Benjamin Myles took a liking to€ nature.
Increasingly, these meetings have become an opportunity for activists to push the fossil fuel industry towards more progressive positions on climate change, with resolutions aimed at everything from greater transparency over lobbying and emissions to forcing alignment with the Paris€ Agreement.€
"These Fed facilities are not supposed to direct aid specifically to certain companies or industries—particularly not ones that were in dire financial shape even before the coronavirus crisis began."
"Whether we like it not, the world has changed: it looks completely different from how it did a few months ago and it will probably not look the same again and we are going to have to choose a new way forward," she said.
"If one single virus can destroy economies in a matter of weeks, it shows we are not thinking long term and we are not taking these risks into account."
She was taking part in a streamed event to mark Earth Day, launched 50 years ago to highlight environmental challenges.
"We're facing the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression—subsidizing the insurers is not going to cut it."
"The steps that our international coalition of lawmakers is proposing are not radical," said Sanders. "It is the very least that these financial institutions should do to prevent an unimaginable increase in poverty, hunger, and disease."
Right now in Seattle, Washington, Amazon — arguably the company positioned to profit the most from COVID-19 — is fighting to suppress a movement for a progressive tax. Amazon’s biggest ally in the fight: so-called progressive Democrats.
As the top infectious disease expert testifies to the Senate that needless death and suffering could result from reopening too quickly, author and journalist Naomi Klein says a “pandemic shock doctrine” is beginning to emerge. “The fact that a large sector of the economy, the healthcare industry, sees a potential bonanza here … that’s a win for them.”
"The historic crisis Americans are facing will not end on its own. To end it, these three things—getting people paychecks, ensuring access to healthcare, supporting businesses and their workers—are critical. But this legislation does not yet address them at the scale necessary."
This past Friday, May 8, the US Labor Dept. released its latest jobless figures. The official report was 20 million more unemployed and an unemployment rate of 14.7%.
Donald Trump claims that while he is president, his pre-presidency financial records can’t be subpoenaed and he can’t even be investigated for criminal conduct. The Supreme Court will decide by the end of June whether Trump is indeed beyond the reach of the law.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ eagerly awaited Friday morning Official Unemployment Rate report for April—what editors generally call the BLS’s “headline” rate of unemployment —was definitely headline-worthy. This was especially evident in the next day’s New York Times (5/9/20), which ran a bar chart of historic unemployment going back to 1946 across the top of the front page, and then a long red bar down the right-hand column of the entire page showing job losses for April.
The accusations against the projected Democratic Party presidential nominee, Joe Biden, trouble and confuse U.S. liberals. As a result, they say surprising and, at times, outrageous things. I suppose this is the consequence of deeming Joe Biden to the most likely candidate to oust Donald Trump from office, something so important that you’re ready to sacrifice both reason and compassion.
The themes the Left should be coalescing around are dismantling rentier capitalism, offering a new income distribution system in which basic income divorced from the performance of labor is the anchor, and reviving all forms of commons and commoning.
"I'm not upset Paul Manafort was released," said one criminal justice reform advocate. "As always, I'm upset that people who aren't rich, white, & connected (nearly everyone of the millions currently caged) aren't treated with the same care, consideration, or humanity."
Scholars at the Russian Academy of Sciences have issued an open letter condemning the authorities in Tver for removing two memorial plaques that honored the victims of the Stalinist repressions. The text was published by the newspaper Kommersant with the signatures of 69 academics.
"These amendments would pretty much guarantee the ability of an incumbent administration to spy on its political opponents without consequence."
Does the political left even exist in any meaningful way in the US today?€ As a lifelong card-carrying member of the left since the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War, I believe that the left exists now in splintered ways and primarily in its many expressions on the Internet. In terms of the left online, I can make an argument that words without actions don’t amount to a political or economic hill of beans. In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, the left exists only online.
"Progressives must oppose this bill so as to stop being taken for granted and to set us on a course that leads to stronger legislation moving forward."
Federal lawmakers in Russia’s State Duma have submitted draft legislation that would allow people to vote in elections and referenda by mail and through the Internet, United Russia deputy Dmitry Vyatkin confirmed to the news agency RIA Novosti.
Russian lawmakers have adopted the third and final reading of legislation that will expand prohibitions on ex-convicts’ rights to run for elected office. The bill won the support of 250 deputies and was opposed by 81 members of parliament.
Jared Kushner created a stir on Tuesday evening when an interview with him was published online in which he expressed how the Trump administration was possibly considering delaying the 2020 presidential election date due to the coronavirus pandemic.
"Managing coronavirus is hard enough when a country is at peace but fueling conflict on top of a pandemic is reprehensible."
Reuters has published an in-depth report on qualified immunity, the Supreme Court-created legal doctrine that allows law enforcement officers to avoid being held responsible for rights violations, so long as they've taken care to violate rights in a way courts haven't previously directly addressed.
Donald Trump’s habit of making statements that are transparently, demonstrably untrue is well known, but even by his standards his latest claim is a whopper.
In early 2018, an incoming Trump political appointee and ally of Vice President Mike Pence made an unusual suggestion to a United Nations agency whose funding hinged on support from a skeptical Trump administration: He pitched them to do business with one of his private-sector clients.
“Might merit your team’s consideration,” Max Primorac wrote in January, weeks before he formally started at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he would eventually become an adviser to Pence.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday, via teleconference, about the power to investigate the president.
President Donald Trump has objected to subpoenas for his tax returns and other financial records. New York City prosecutors have demanded the documents as part of a criminal investigation into the president’s hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels, while the House of Representatives has been seeking to investigate the conflicts of interests of a president who still owns a sprawling business.
The issue is a simple one: Are the 538 presidential electors free agents, or must they vote in accordance with the election results in their states? If they are free to vote as they wish, a small group of them, or even a single one in a tight contest, could decide who wins the White House.
Later that month, Warren, along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), announced plans to introduce the “Pandemic Anti-Monopoly Act,” which would impose a large merger moratorium until the Federal Trade Commission “determines that small businesses, workers, and consumers are no longer under severe financial distress,” according to NBC News.
Deputy Postmaster General Ronald Stroman has reportedly been forced out of his position, throwing the leadership of the U.S. Postal Service into further chaos as the agency faces a potentially catastrophic financial crisis and efforts by Trump administration officials to impose draconian changes on the nation’s most popular government institution.
"Trump is intent on installing his partisan lackeys in control of the Postal Service while congressional Republicans try to force it into insolvency so they can privatize it."
Facebook Inc. has again blocked Ramzan Kadyrov’s Instagram account, in observance of U.S. sanctions against the Chechen ruler. Visitors trying to view Kadyrov’s page now find the message: “Sorry, this page isn't available. The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.”€
Journalism cannot survive, and certainly not thrive, without resources. And those resources are not coming from a “free market” that has stalled out. There has to be a federal fix, and that means that Congress must include muscular support for journalism in stimulus measures.
“Local media is a critical source of news and information for communities, holds our government accountable, and plays an important role in our civic engagement,” argues former member of the Federal Communications Commission Michael Copps, who now counsels Common Cause on media issues. “But the health crisis our nation faces combined with the long-term decline in local news has left many communities without adequate sources of trustworthy news on the pandemic and has created a void in civic information. Congress must act now to ensure local news is adequately funded in order to meet the information needs of communities.”
History is made, not decreed, which is why on May 11th, activists from dozens of different countries launched Progressive International, a global initiative with a mission to unite, organize and mobilize progressive forces.
At this time, Shamshuddin Mulla would have been in the fields – repairing engines and pumps.
"We need people like [Eastman] in Congress to join the fights on healthcare, tackling student debt, and taking on corporate power."
His slaying has become a global embarrassment for whites. But when the camera turns away, the savage injustice that embarrasses us becomes simply business as usual.
On the day after armed protestors stormed the Capitol building in Michigan to demand that the whole economy be re-opened, the news included reports that Michigan has the highest current death rates in the United States from the novel coronavirus. That is a serious problem.
Steve Earle recorded an album, “Ghosts of West Virginia,” that centers on the survivors of the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion.
The third track on the album, which will be released on May 22, is “Devil Put The Coal In The Ground.”
Last August, the North Carolina Court of Appeals decided it was OK for police officers to use protected speech as the basis for retaliatory stops. The stop -- and the criminal charges that followed -- originated from this interaction:
Asking citizens to snitch on other citizens never seems to work out very well. The federal government has been doing it for years, maintaining "See Something, Say Something" hotlines that have mostly collected tips from people concerned about what their browner neighbors are doing. The same thing happens in the private sector. Ring's proprietary app -- Neighbors -- collects the same sort of garbage, empowering bigots to feel like they're acting on behalf of the common good.
Tyson Timbs went all the way to the US Supreme Court to get his forfeited Land Rover returned to him. Represented by the Institute for Justice, Timbs took his case through every level of the Indiana court system before finding relief in the nation's top court. Seven years after his vehicle was seized during his arrest for heroin dealing, he's still waiting for the cops to return his car.
Attorneys representing Taylor's family say that Glover – who they say was the police's intended target of the night's warrants – was "located and identified by (police) prior to the warrant being executed at Breonna’s home."
You can find this work unappealing, immoral, or not for you, and it does not change the fact that it is work: a job people do in exchange for money.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Leitman in Flint, Michigan, issued a preliminary injunction barring the U.S. Small Business Administration from enforcing a rule to exclude businesses that present live performances or sell products of a "prurient sexual nature" from loans under the Paycheck Protection Program.
The judge also said the SBA cannot exclude other businesses such as banks, political lobbying firms and restricted private clubs from the roughly $660 billion program, saying Congress intended to support all qualified small businesses, including those it might have been "disfavored" before the pandemic struck.
Despite such grim evidence of how much these essential workers have put their lives on the line for their jobs and the public, on Sunday, May 17, the national grocery-store chain will end a $2 per hour hazard pay, which they dubbed a "hero pay" bonus, for workers. This decision has caused many employees, and the union representing them, to push back.
Jonathan Williams is the communications director for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 400, the union representing Kroger store associates. He says the union is calling on the company to extend the bonus, which was enacted in April, indefinitely until the end of this crisis for all Kroger associates continuing to work.
On one hand, we have wireless companies trying to insist that 5G is some type of cancer-curing miracle (it's not). On the other hand, we have oodles of conspiracy theorists, celebrities, and various grifters trying to claim 5G is some kind of rampant health menace (it's not). In reality, 5G's not actually interesting enough to warrant either position, but you'd hardly know this reading the US and UK press.
The average size of an email file is about 75 KB. That's around 7,000 words in plain text or about 37.5 pages. Unless you or your correspondents happen to be composing novel chapters in email messages, it's other behind-the-scenes factors that make these files so large.
[...]
However, if you're in business and you market your products by sending promotional emails, large emails take longer to load and require more bandwidth. Therefore, if you include large graphics, your email may be deleted before the graphics render. That timeframe may be a matter of seconds, but billions of emails are sent each day, so your marketing efforts have a lot of competition.
Some email clients won't display a lengthy email. For example, Gmail clips emails that are larger than 102 KB. It supplies readers a link if they want to view the complete email, but there's no guarantee your recipient will be willing to click it.
Large attachments and custom fonts are other add-ons that can make an email render slowly. It could be long enough for the recipient to click away
In the early days before the [Internet] there were local bulletin board systems (BBS) that you could dial into with a dumb terminal. They were servers with a bank of modems and everyone could chat in “teleconference”. Teleconference had channels in it so you could form one or more private chats with multiple users. Then the [Internet] started becoming accessible so the first IRC server was written. It was the teleconference of the [Internet].
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is an Internet protocol which allows people to communicate with each other in real time in a text based environment, see Wikipedia. However, it can be hard to get into and grasp..
"No surprise—it's fighting back as lawmakers conduct an antitrust probe and are realizing what happens when we leave tech monopolies unchecked."€
Despite hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars flowing to private drug companies for vaccine development, top health officials coordinating the Trump administration’s COVID-19 response indicated to Congress on Wednesday that they cannot guarantee universal access to vaccines for the highly contagious disease once they are developed.
Assuring all Americans have access to a vaccine is both "the moral thing to do" and "good public health policy," said the Vermont senator.
There's been plenty of talk these days about content moderation, and how different platforms should moderate their content, but much less attention has been paid to the people who do the actual moderation. Last year, we highlighted an amazing story by Casey Newton at The Verge detailing just what a horrible job it is for many people -- in which they are constantly bombarded with the worst of the internet. Indeed, some of his reporting helped spur on a labor dispute that just ended (reported, again, by Newton) with Facebook agreeing to pay out $52 million to content moderators who developed mental health issues on the job.
The company is supposedly launching this digital crackdown as soon as possible and will even likely extend to older posts. Sources note that it will not explicitly tag these tweets as hoaxes. Twitter global senior strategist for public policy Nick Pickles explains: "People don't want us to play the role of deciding for them what's true and what's not true but they do want people to play a much stronger role providing context."
There is always tension between the First Amendment and trademark law, but it's a tension that is usually dissolved by trademark's primary aims to keep the public well informed as to the source and affiliations of goods and services. Still, it shouldn't be lost on anyone that the law at its heart is chiefly about what a business or commercial interest can name/say about itself. And, while the law carves out space in speech for identifying branding and language, the First Amendment doesn't entirely disappear in such commercial squabbles just because someone shouts trademark at it.
In March, after officially canceling the in-person CC Summit, we began this revisioning process by gathering insightful feedback from members of the CC Global Network and working with the Program Committee. Committee members have proven invaluable during this process and we’re grateful for their hard work, vision, and flexibility. Although there are still many things we need to figure out, I’m excited to provide a brief update on what we have so far, and what we’re working on.€
Netflix has just sent over half a million takedown requests to Google in one week. This is up from an average of about 20,000 earlier this year. The notices mostly appear to target French pirate streaming sites. The surge in takedown notices could be part of an anti-piracy campaign but it's also possible that something more nefarious is going on.
A coalition of entertainment companies headed up by Universal, Paramount, Columbia, Disney and Amazon has obtained an injunction to shut down 'pirate' IPTV service Nitro TV. A court in California has ordered all individuals acting in concert or participation with the service to stop infringing the companies' copyrights, including by disabling its domains.
It's worth pointing out just how difficult it is to get a judge to issue sanctions against a lawyer behaving badly. We cover many, many, many cases involving lawyers behaving really badly, and over and over again we see judges refuse to issue sanctions against those lawyers. Judges give lawyers the benefit of the doubt over and over again. That's one reason why it's so incredible that terrible lawyer and copyright troll Richard Liebowitz keeps getting smacked down by courts for truly egregious behavior.
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life Becomes
2020-05-16 21:48:53
Techrights | Free Software Sentry – watching and reporting maneuvers of those threatened by software freedom - Part 3